Consistently and (almost) without fail, the single biggest pain-point or challenge for the Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients we work with, is client acquisition. The real solution to the problem lies not in short term, desperate client acquisition strategies, but in long term BRANDING.

Position yourself as an expert in your field. Position yourself as the authority figure. Work out what the problems are that your potential clients are facing (you should have a series of client avatars to help with this) and deliver content (inbound marketing) that solves these problems.

In the current marketing landscape, content creation is vital. Let’s discuss why you should be creating content, the process of creating it, how to leverage 40 pieces of content from a single session of creation, and the systems you can use to post and schedule your content to automate your social media presence on set and forget autopilot.

This process of content creation can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. This is intended as a jumping off point, a way to open your eyes to what’s possible. Take the bits you like, that work for you, and run with them.

• Why create content?
• Provide value to your current and potential clients.
• Set yourself up as an authority.
• There may not be an immediate return on investment, but you’re positioning yourself in the mind of a potential client so when they need a service, they think of you.
• A place to include a call to action.

So how should we actually create the content? What’s the process, or system?

Begin by identifying what the content should be about. It’s important to create about something you know, but more important to create about something people want to hear. Solve the problems and pain points you’ve identified when defining their avatar. You should already know their pain points from this avatar exercise, but there are two further ways to find them, observe their behaviour and struggles, and ask them.

Once you have their pain points, make some bullet points on the content which answer their questions. This is the content you’ll be presenting. Ideally, you want all content to be ‘evergreen’, that is, it shouldn’t date. The information and advice you’re presenting should be just as relevant in three years as it is now. The reasons for this will become clear when we discuss the automation of content distribution.

There are two ways to proceed with the content creation process, and you should use both.

When you’re first starting your journey of content creation, you want to go through the process of creating bulk content. As we’ll discover when we cover content scheduling, automation and distribution, we want to kick start the process with a large amount of content. This means you need to allocate a day or a week to creating this initial critical mass of content.

The second content creation strategy is to systemise an ongoing content creation strategy. This is an ongoing process of content creation where you identify (for example) that you’ll be creating and scheduling content (i.e. answering people’s pain points) every Friday morning. This constant weekly ‘top-up’ ensures you’re constantly adding to the initial mass of content you’ve created.

Content can take many forms and many different types of media, and can be based around video, audio or text. It doesn’t matter which form we choose, because we’ll be able to leverage each topic we create content on by transplanting that same content into a different form. Basically, we’re providing the exact same information in a different medium. For example, text can become a video. Video can become audio etc. In this way, one content ‘topic’ can become multiple individual pieces of content, delivered to different people through different avenues. Not only can we create different forms of media, but the same piece of media can be replicated across multiple distribution channels (for example, a video can be posted to Facebook, on Instagram TV, YouTube, embedded in a blog post etc.).

As an example, you can create the following pieces of content, for various platforms, each covering the same topic and leveraged off the initial piece of content:

• Podcast episode.
• YouTube video (with captions).
• Longform Facebook video (with captions).
• Longform Instagram TV video (if you’re using IGTV, make sure you’re in the middle third of the image when you film in landscape).
• Shortform Instagram feed video.
• Shortform Instagram stories video.
• Blog (text) article (on your website). Also the option to embed both video and audio in this blog.
• Text to be posted directly on to Facebook or to be hosted on a platform like Medium.

So the process becomes simple:

• Identify the problems that people need solved.
• Make notes on how you’d solve these problems.
• Create a piece of content (in any form of media).
• Convert that piece of content in to as many different forms as possible.

This resource isn’t meant to be an in-depth technical guide to the actual content creation process, but it is useful to discuss some key point to consider when creating content. There follows the process we follow at Range of Motion in creating content.

You should begin creating content on a topic in a medium that you’re most comfortable in. If you prefer writing over talking in front of a camera, start there (we can create the video/audio later).

Video content:

The first consideration when creating visual content is the set up of the content creation environment. Equipment-wise, you’ll be able to create good quality videos with a tripod, camera (smartphone will be fine), some good lighting (can just use daylight, or you can pick up a couple of lightboxes for pretty cheap online) and a lapel mic (that connects to your phone).

With your environment set-up, simply hit record and talk to the camera, solving the problems your avatars are facing. Let’s say for example that you’re talking for five minutes about how to make exercise more time-efficient (solving a pain point that people don’t have time to exercise). Assuming that the video is the first piece of content your creating on that topic, you now have your first piece of content on time-efficient exercise.

Let’s leverage that content into other forms.

Save the video as an ‘audio only’ file. This becomes a podcast (the intricacies of podcasting are beyond the scope of what we’ll cover here, but by using Garageband to record, auphonic.com to standardise sound levels and libsyn.com to host, you’re 80% of the way there). Upload the video to a transcription service like rev.com. They’ll transcribe the video so it’s converted in to text. Now you have text content for a blog, articles, or direct posting to social media. Rev.com will also provide you an .srt file which you can then use on platforms like Youtube and Facebook to caption your videos.

Of course, we don’t just leverage the video into other forms, but we can also use that video in multiple ways too. First the full, uncut ‘longform’ video. Upload the video to your Youtube channel (for bonus points, make a YouTube thumbnail for the video, which can you then also use on social media or in email marketing when sharing and distributing the video). Upload the video to Instagram TV. Upload the video to Facebook. Let’s now make this video shortform. Edit the video to include just the key points – reducing what may have been a five minute video to under 60 seconds. This summary video will have short ‘sound-bites’ and teasers of the full video. Edit some light, bright, upbeat music over the video. This gives you a 60 second summary clip that’s perfect for Instagram, and also for Instagram TV. When you post these, make sure you let people know they can also access the full version of this content on your blog, IGTV, YouTube, Facebook page etc.

In this example, we started with a video and created audio content and written content from it. While this is possibly the most efficient way, you can start with any media and leverage it in to others.

With all this content now waiting in the wings, we can now do one of three things with it, we can post it immediately, we can create a system to remind us to post it later, or we can automate the process of posting it (preferably with automated recurring postings so you can set and forget).

Once you’ve got all your content, what do you do with it? You’ll start by posting it to all your channels, using all platforms and media types we’ve discussed. But because the content is evergreen, it doesn’t end there. Next, we schedule and automate this process, which we cover in Content Scheduling and Automation.